Meet PsycINFO's New Senior Director: Mary Sauer-Games

Mary Sauer-Games brings experience working with large publishers and with libraries and librarians across the user spectrum.

We are pleased to announce that PsycINFO has a new Senior Director, Mary Sauer-Games.

A Little Background

Mary comes to us from her native Michigan, bringing with her almost 20 years of experience in publishing. That experience has been focused primarily on marketing and product management and has taken her from stints at Thomson Gale as Marketing Director and Vice President of E-Learning to a storied career at ProQuest, where she's been a vice president in a number of roles: Market Development, Chadwyck-Healey Publishing, and Higher Education Publishing.

Much of Mary's career to date has been spent working with electronic databases that serve the library market. She brings experience working with large publishers and with libraries and librarians across the user spectrum — public, academic, and corporate — though her focus in recent years has been on the academic market. Inevitably, she's been in the thick of changes that have swept electronic publishing in the past two decades and has excelled at adapting to new technologies while adapting new technologies to simplify the research process and help users connect with information.

At Thompson Gale in the mid-90s she brought well-recognized print reference sources like The Encyclopedia of Associations into the electronic age. She later moved on to digitizing the back files of the venerable The Times of London and then on to combining journal and textbook content for early e-learning initiatives.

At ProQuest in the early 2000s she began working with the Chadwyck-Healey databases, and her focus shifted primarily to the humanities. She next managed ABI Inform and later a variety of ProQuest's science-technical-medical databases.

Her work has even included a project to digitize Queen Victoria's personal journals that secured her a royal audience with Victoria's great, great granddaughter Elizabeth II.

Mary also serves on the board of the National Federation of Advanced Information Services.

Why PsycINFO?

So what was it about PsycINFO that made taking the senior director job attractive? Mary already knew and liked our products. PsycINFO® was the most frequently used database on the ProQuest platform, and many psychology and education students used it. She appreciated both the high quality of the database and, as she listened to people who used it, its interdisciplinary coverage.

A psychology faculty member she recently encountered described psychology as "a 'hub' field; regardless of the research project, psychology has a seat at the table and input relevant to the question at hand." Mary too wanted a place at that table and, as PsycINFO is the behavioral science database, her skills in marketing and product management combined with APA's data offer her an opportunity to make more connections from PsycINFO to a wider spectrum of disciplines.

Another of the challenges she enjoys — and feels is among the biggest the library community faces — is helping libraries connect with their users. One of her main goals is to continue to drive awareness of the library, so users come to recognize and rely on the library as the source for credible information. PsycINFO and our other databases provide that credibility, as they are the intersection between an ever-growing pool of researchers and the library information hub.

What's the Future?

What does that mean in practical terms and what can you expect? Though she's only two months into her new position, it's safe to make some predictions about the combination of Mary's skills and interests and APA's databases and publishing divisions.

First, she will — indeed, is already — turning her attention to our existing and potential library communities. She wants to work directly with users — students, faculty, and librarians — so expect us to be listening even more to your and your users' needs and concerns.

Second, she wants to work with content that has proven value to individual and team researchers, so expect new energy to go into existing products. For example, PsycTESTS® will certainly continue to receive continuing emphasis (see the article in this issue on our 20,000th record).

Third, though it's too early to predict precisely what new products will be coming from PsycINFO, we can confidently predict that once we have had a chance to talk and work with you and have recognized an unfilled need, we will be developing solutions to make your research even more productive.

Meanwhile, join us in welcoming Mary when you meet her at conferences or other venues.

Mary came east in advance of her family, but by summer's end, she expects to be rejoined in DC by her husband Nelson (her son Blake, having finished his final year of high school, is headed off to a new beginning of his own at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University). Her sheltie Pickles will also make the trek east and is looking forward to picking up agility training again in her new home.